SOURCE: An introduction to When Old Baldy Spoke, by Charles Egbert Craddock, in The Emory University Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer, 1962, pp. 93-106.

In the following excerpt, Dillingham links Murfree's short fiction with both the genteel tradition and the school of realism.

In 1885, the year when William Dean Howells published The Rise of Silas Lapham and the Statue of Liberty was being assembled on Bedloe's Island, a young woman walked calmly into the offices of the Atlantic Monthly and informed the editor, Thomas Baily Aldrich, that SHE was the Mr. Charles Egbert Craddock who had been writing stories for his magazine. Neither Silas Lapham nor the Statue of Liberty caused much more of a stir that year than this literary disclosure. In Boston the news that Charles Egbert Craddock was actually a woman, Mary Noailles Murfree, made the front page, and the young lady from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, found herself...